Ed Harris wears an Ulysse Nardin Maxi Marine Chronometer

More than once, Phantom lets the camera settle on its captain's wrist, where a watch sits at the cuff of a Soviet naval uniform. Ed Harris plays that captain, Demi, a tired officer handed one last patrol aboard a ballistic-missile submarine and sent to sea with a KGB man who carries his own orders and a device that can make the boat sound like another ship. Time is the whole of a submariner's trade: the depth he can hold, the next radio window, the moment to surface. The watch is what he reads to keep all three.

It is a Ulysse Nardin Maxi Marine Chronometer, and it cannot be on that wrist. The film is set in 1968, and Ulysse Nardin did not build the Maxi Marine Chronometer, a 43mm Swiss watch, until the 2000s, more than thirty years after Demi's patrol. The watch magazine Worn & Wound, cataloging screen anachronisms, singled it out as one very clearly not available in 1968. It is the ordinary kind of mistake that drifts into a period film, a modern watch on a wrist from the wrong decade.

The 2013 film takes its bones from a real loss. In March 1968 the Soviet submarine K-129 sank in the Pacific with all hands, for reasons never settled, and the United States later spent years and a purpose-built ship trying to lift the wreck off the seabed. The film hangs its fictional patrol on that wreck.

And the watch is wrong in a way that argues for it. Ulysse Nardin built its name in the nineteenth century on marine chronometers, the boxed clocks a ship's navigators relied on long before satellites, and by the company's own account it supplied them to more than fifty of the world's navies. A Soviet captain in 1968 would have steered by exactly that kind of instrument. The watch that could not sit on Demi's wrist turns out to carry the one pedigree the job asks for, which makes it, of all things, the historically right brand on the wrong wrist.